Is it Easier to Upgrade or Lift & Shift to the Cloud?

There are rumblings in the enterprise and cloud industry in regards to mobility of systems and platforms being moved to the cloud.

Questions remain about billing and which provider offers the best means to move workloads from the enterprise to the cloud or from cloud to cloud. It is essentially called “Lift & Shift”and amusingly, it hearkens back to the good old Ricky Bobby phrase of “Shake & Bake”; but honestly, it is a common issue among those who feel the most pain when it comes to making a crucial decision in front of a board. Especially when they are facing their next Capital Expenditure refresh of let’s say, the last 5 years.

Those customers who bought into systems back in 2011 can easily relate to the fact thatCloud transition is now a relevant strategy in their Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and Return on Investment (ROI) for the foreseeable future. The threats to security systems today have grown much more substantial and in much more complex and regulatory environments in the last 5 years. For HIPAA customers, OMNIBUS and Stage 2 Meaningful use was not on the radar. PCI DSS was being refined for version 2.0, 1.x was retiring and Ransomware was nowhere in the news. Cryptocurrency such as Bitcoin, had just begun to take off with certain sites accepting donations such as the Free Software Foundation, thus further blurring the lines of financials and auditing for the future.

The question remains: Is it easier to buy new hardware and upgrade systems or is it easier to “Lift & Shift” to the cloud? After all, businesses can be absolved of certain concerns such as future upgrades and power and cooling right? Well, it all sounds great when you no longer have to worry about cabling, racking & stacking 120lb servers and disk arrays, but truly, what is the hard part – the catch to cloud?

The investment of time and resources to not only migrate systems, but to ensure the data remains secure and intact is the catch.

Cloud Migration is one of the currently top trending cloud terms in the industry today. Cloud Service Providers need to make it easyto bring in customers whether it is via production workloads or Disaster Recovery (DR) targeted workloads. It has to be easy. It is no longer about CIOs putting all of their eggs in one cloud basket. They will hedge risk with the Mega Cloud Providers and use boutique services with regional cloud providers, and that’s where good providers can deliver – a migration securely. Once they realize the big-box Cloud Providers can’t handle all of their needs, they will come looking for differentiating “White Glove” and “High Touch” services that can make the pain of Lift & Shift become a non-issue and non-authoritarian throughout the entire experience and beyond.